THEORY-1302: Sánchez-Cañizares reinterprets Irruption Theory for binary decisions (IAT*): irruption is the onset of a landscape with one attractor per option and absorption the passage to a single attractor, both correlated in mind and brain, reversing the sign of Froese's variance hypothesis; the mind's causal role is to set the landscape's control parameters by "selecting the relevant physical coarse-graining", not to push the state, so on this account the mind controls which outcomes exist and not which one the state reaches

Source

Sánchez-Cañizares (2026), LIT-1992, §§2–3 and 6 (PDF pp. 4–7, 18–20), fn. 12 (p. 10); read in NOTE-1506. Froese 2023 (LIT-1950) and Froese 2024 (not held) are the theory revised.

What was actually shown

The revision (pp. 5–6). Froese 2024 pairs irruption in the mind with absorption in the brain and conversely. IAT* pairs them in correlation: “absorption in both the mind and the brain, and irruption in both as well”, with either able to be cause or effect (fn. 5). It is “a modelling assumption for binary decision-making tasks” (p. 2).

The sign reversal (fn. 12, p. 10). Froese: irruption “coincides with decreases in shared variance”, absorption with increases. “Here, however, we claim the opposite”, on the evidence for critical fluctuations and slowing near transitions.

The mind’s role (pp. 3, 7, 19). “The mind selects how to coarse-grain finer physical degrees of freedom of the brain”; “Through ‘irruption,’ the mind formally sets up the relevant attractor landscape”; “Selecting the relevant physical coarse-graining in a specific task seems to be the particular causal role of the mind. That is how the mind ‘interacts’ with the brain without messing with physical efficient causation.”

Why the parameters are left to the mind (p. 19). Their “microscopic derivation … turns out cumbersome, open to serendipity and a certain amount of arbitrariness”, so the model “still provides the black-box frame in which IAT may develop”.

The architecture (this reading). In the model, nothing acts on φ but the gradient and noise. During the bistable interval, which well a path reaches is fixed by its initial condition and noise (pp. 10–11); what the schedule then does is remove one well (b → 0). So the parameter channel selects the set of outcomes, and the selection among them is not modelled.

What this does not say

• That the mind sets the parameters. The paper grants that a and b also move with stimulus and internal dynamics (p. 15) and that IAT* is untested.
• That the paper reproduces or replaces Sánchez-Cañizares 2024 (LIT-1132), which it summarizes in one sentence (p. 19).
• That this is Kane’s view or concerns chaos. Neither is cited, and the model, a one-dimensional gradient flow, cannot be chaotic.